1. Field of the Prior Art
The present invention relates to a slip used for accounting and method of and apparatus for automatic reading and recognition of such a slip received through facsimile transmission.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There has been in practice a system in which handwritten slips or statistic data are read by an optical character recognition apparatus or facsimile unit whereby the data are input to a data processor such as a computer. As a method for inputting an incoming signal transmitted through a facsimile system or the like to a data processor such as a computer, one disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 53-26945 is known.
Referring to FIGS. 8 and 9, it is known in the prior art that a slip 51 can be scanned by a facsimile unit, not shown, and only the portion corresponding to the position of a box 53 is read by an input unit, whereby it is detected whether or not there is a mark 54 in the box 53. The position of the box 53 is recognized by counting the number of pulses of a clock signal to be started at the leading edge of a detection signal of a start mark 52 on the slip 51.
However, conventional numeral recognition apparatus have not yet been made competent for a full automatic operation. Slips for use in payment and receipt of money in banks or the like, in particular, are required to be 100 percent accurate because banks have the public as their customers. Therefore, even now, such slips are handled completely dependent upon inputting by an operator using a keyboard.
With conventional automatic input systems, there has been such a problem, when the synchronism with the clock pulses is disturbed by some external disturbance after the start of reading the start mark 52, that it becomes difficult to correctly locate the position of the box 53 and the detection of the mark 54 results in a failure, and as a result the efficiency in data transmission is lowered.
There has also been such a problem that correct reading is made impossible when there are present some stains in the marks 52, 54 or their color is faded to some grayish color.
In the case of the slip 51 of FIG. 9, it is arranged such that decision of type of the format of the slip 51 is made according to a written classification mark 61 in a classification box 60, and therefore, the classification mark 61 has to be written into a correct position of a predetermined region in the classification box 60. Therefore, for the sake of safety, such an arrangement has been only applicable to a simple slip system.
Thus, there has not been existent such an accurate apparatus for numeral recognition that enables a signal from a slip for payment and receipt of money transmitted through a facsimile unit or the like to be input to a data processor such as a computer directly. There has been no way to input data from the slip other than relying upon assistance of human power furnished by an operator.